Introducing Cobra

[Andrew Lentvorski]

Ralph Shumaker wrote:
> SJS wrote:
>> The eye *believes* whitespace, but it's also not very good at it.  It's
>> okay at determining that yeah, verily, there *is* whitespace, but it's
>> not very good at determining how much.  For very small programs, that's
>> okay; but these languages are no longer being used solely for small 
>> programs.
>>   
> 
> I never understood why spaces and tabs cannot be displayed with 
> something visible.

Because a tab is not a printing character, it is a *control* character, 
and its semantics are poorly defined.

Tab is *not* just n spaces.  It is "move the head/platen to tab stop" 
and "tab stop" is defined by the end user.

> I like when the 0 (zero) is made distinctive with a dot in the middle.  
> I never liked that 0 looks so similar to O and in some places are almost 
> indistinguishable from one another.  The 1 and the l (and sometimes I) 
> are almost as bad.  There is no reason why they have to look that much 
> alike.

What you want is called a programming font.
http://keithdevens.com/wiki/ProgrammerFonts

> Come to think of it, does anyone know how I can modify the fonts that 
> show up in gnome terminal and vim, and even the console while I'm at it, 
> and any other fonts that are used by programs like firefox and 
> thunderbird?  Come to think of it, I can't be the only one who has ever 
> wanted such a thing.  Is anyone aware of fonts already so modified?

No *font* modification is capable of delivering that behavior.

-a